When your system is put behind a proxy and it is not configured to be that way you will get these strange GPG errors. So your choices are to reconfigure to work through a proxy or to get rid of the proxy (I chose the latter).

NOTE: A simple way to confirm that your system is behind a proxy is to ping a website and observe the IP or name of the from portion of the reply. If the from portion is from an unexpected address then you may be accidentally behind a proxy as I was.